With Greg Schiano, the coaching carousel just got even stranger

The way head coaches get hired and fired at the end of the college football season is always enough to make your head spin. This coach leaves here, that coach gets hired there, it’s almost too much to keep up with at times. And yesterday provided us with maybe the craziest day in coaching carousel history.

Dan Mullen was hired as the Gators new head coach and rumors were running rampant that FSU head coach, Jimbo Fisher, was about to bolt for a big contract at Texas A&M, which is still yet be determined.

But it was Greg Schiano, who is currently the defensive coordinator for Ohio St, that took center stage. He was very briefly announced as the new head coach of Tennessee in an expected move. At first glance, you could see that Schiano does not really fit the profile of Tennessee football, he’s more of a mid/northwestern tough nose, grind it out kind of coach. And when the announcement was made yesterday afternoon, the fans and local media made their distaste for the hire loudly known.

Local radio hosts took to the airwaves and urged fans to boycott the hire, using an old disproven story as their ammo that Schiano was allegedly involved with covering up the child sex abuse that took place at Penn St. when he was an assistant there. The clambering was so loud on social media and elsewhere that Tennessee actually ended up firing Schiano just hours later, before he was ever officially hired.

Many fans pointed to this as a victory and were proud with how much influence they could have on this decision just by making their voices heard through social media and other outlets. Others think that this may have set a dangerous precedent for future hirings by different universities by giving too much to power to angry fans. Either way, this was definitely unprecedented and it could just be the beginning of this story.